Labor Day photo was taken on Alamo Plaza

By Paula Allen :
November 7, 2013

This photograph was taken for the Labor Day parade of 1914. Behind the electrical workers on Alamo Plaza is the Maverick Bank Building.

I'm writing about your Sept. 8 column with the photo of the electrical workers. I am a downtown San Antonio history buff and couldn't figure out exactly where the photo was taken, so I drove around Alamo Plaza and identified the corner as Alamo and Houston streets, with the building on the right being the old Gibbs Building across from the old main post office/federal building. If I'm right, the building the men are standing in front of is what became the old Woolworth's. If I'm correct, was this building torn down or were the ornate balconies removed?

Connie Fuller

The photograph, taken in 1914 at the Labor Day parade, represents members of Local No. 60 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers assembled on Alamo Plaza.

You're right about the location, which is impressive considering that most of the visible buildings either have been replaced or much altered. As you note, the building on the right is the Gibbs Building, which dates back to 1909 and after lengthy renovations became the Indigo Hotel, 105 N. Alamo St. The 1891 post office was across the street. It was torn down in favor of what is now the Hipolito F. Garcia Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, opened in 1937 at 615 E. Houston St.

Tom Shelton, photo curator at the Institute of Texan Cultures, confirms the location and comments that the men probably were standing on the walk in front of the Alamo grounds. The building in the background is the long-gone Maverick Bank Building, completed in 1886 with “elaborate balcony grillwork rendering it a transplant from New Orleans,” says Lewis F. Fisher in “Saving San Antonio: The Precarious Preservation of a Heritage.”

The five-story building “was considered San Antonio's first skyscraper and the tallest building west of the Mississippi.” It was built for pioneer Anglo settler Sam Maverick (1837-1936), who owned considerable property along Houston Street and went into banking after the Civil War, when he returned to San Antonio to become “one of the city's leading businessmen,” according to his obituary in the San Antonio Express, Feb. 29, 1936. The bank building replaced Maverick's lumber yard on the site and sparked a building boom of multistory commercial structures along Houston Street.

Though the newer Gibbs building had seven more stories, the Maverick Bank building is said to have been just as tall as its rival on the opposite corner, “the ceilings being unusually high,” says Fred Mosebach in a historical article about downtown development in the Express, May 20, 1934. Two years after the bank failed in 1892, the building was purchased for $70,000 by attorney P.H. Swearingen and other members of his family; it became known as the Swearingen-McCraw building. Some years later, Swearingen announced that it would be torn down and a “thoroughly up-to-date office building” would take its place, says the San Antonio Light, May 9, 1908.

Instead, Swearingen kept the old building, where he had his own offices, after “concluding that the investment (in a modern office building) would be more profitable at a later date,” says the Light, Dec. 5, 1910, and determined that the former bank building “would be repaired, to some extent remodeled and rented for office purposes.”

It was finally torn down during the late 1920s and replaced by a three-story building with retail space on the ground floor. Occupied for more than 60 years by the F.W. Woolworth Co., it was known as the Woolworth's building, 518-522 E. Houston St. The five-and-dime store increasingly catered to tourists drawn by the Alamo across the street until it closed in the early 1990s.

Email Paula Allen at historycolumn@yahoo.com. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/sahistory
column.